Mayor Stephanie Miner said Gov. Andrew Cuomo's planned task force to help distressed cities is unlikely to succeed unless it includes city officials, union leaders and others with a stake in the outcome.Dick Blume | dblume@syracuse.com

By staff writers Tim Knauss
and Teri Weaver

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Mayor Stephanie Miner said she is "hopeful" that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s planned task force on municipal finance will help distressed cities, but she questioned whether it can solve city problems if no local officials serve on the panel.

Miner said she would like the governor to establish a broad-based task force that includes a mayor, a union leader, a business representative and others who wrestle with city fiscal issues. The panel should undertake a wide-ranging discussion of the difficult choices ahead, she said.

But Cuomo is taking a more targeted approach. Rather than seek a one-size-fits-all solution, Cuomo has said he envisions a task force that will work with mayors and other municipal leaders one by one to address their specific issues. Unlike statewide policy panels such as the Mandate Relief Council, the municipal task force is intended to help find solutions that are specific to each community. There are no plans to include any political leaders on the task force, his aides say.

Cuomo first mentioned plans for the task force as part of a “financial restructuring assistance program’’ proposed in his State of the State Address in January. He has said he hopes to get the panel established by early summer.

In the State of the State speech, the governor said the task force would consist of the state comptroller, the attorney general, the Division of Budget, and private-sector restructuring consultants.

Assemblyman Bill Magnarelli, D-Syracuse, who chairs the Assembly’s local governments committee, said he was optimistic about the task force. “I think it’s very positive, putting such a plan together,” he said.

Miner, who has long sounded the alarm about the financial crises bearing down on cities, has not spoken with Cuomo about his plans for the task force. Indeed, Miner has not spoken with Cuomo since October, she said.

Her outspoken demands that Cuomo address city finances have drawn a frosty reception from the governor, whose aides have suggested at times that Miner is simply looking for a state bailout.

The last time Miner spoke with anyone from Cuomo’s staff was Feb. 13, when she called to warn them about an opinion piece she wrote for The New York Times. In it, Miner chastised Cuomo for neglecting city problems and called his budget proposal to smooth out municipal pension payments a “gimmick.’’

Syracuse, like many Upstate cities, struggles with an eroding property tax base, mounting pension and health care costs for retirees, decaying infrastructure and other problems that have created what Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli called “long-term systemic problems.’’

Solving those problems will require creativity and sacrifice from all sides, Miner said. That’s why she’d like to see a broadly inclusive task force.

“There is no magic bullet,’’ Miner said. “Everybody is going to have to sacrifice and everybody is going to have to be part of the solution. In order for that to work, politically, you have to have everyone at the table.’’

Cuomo spokesman Richard Azzopardi said there is a new opportunity this year for municipal leaders to negotiate with public unions, because a state law requiring arbitration of contract disputes is set to expire. So-called binding arbitration has long been an impediment to negotiating contract changes, city officials say.

"The current troubles facing local governments, coupled with the looming expiration of binding arbitration, provide a unique opportunity to bring all stakeholders in a municipality to the table and create a fiscally strong and stable plan,'' Azzopardi said. "Our goal is to help the locality with this restructuring, and then get out of the way so it can manage its own finances. "